With a grin on my face, I march back to the bridge. ‘I’ve got it.’
I walk my housemates through the code. The first section, the blue-whale song, is an algorithm for decrypting the second section, which is the actual message. The third section provides phonetic clues that tell us the language used in that message: Bundeli, a derivation of Hindi, which happens to be my ancestral tongue and the native dialect of Captain Nemo.
‘Wow.’ Halimah nods appreciatively. ‘Nice work, Ana.’
‘No kidding,’ Virgil says. ‘I thought I was going to go crazy if we listened to that recording one more time. I wish I had your ear.’
I try not to feel too pleased with myself. ‘I just put together what you guys did. Jack, can you –？’
Jack’s mouth is full of peanut-butter sandwich, but he starts scribbling, translating the coded message into English.
He hands the notepad to Lee-Ann to read.
She clears her throat dramatically. ‘And the winner is … “This is Lincoln Base. Identify. Five hours.”’
Halimah frowns. ‘That was a lot of work for a really short message.’
‘？le Lincoln,’ Gem chimes in. ‘That’s what Harding and Pencroft named the island where they were stranded.’
The Dolphins turn and stare at him.
‘What?’ he asks. ‘I read The Mysterious Island, too.’
I study the LOCUS display. It’s still riddled with purple blotches like the pattern from a shotgun blast. My nerves tingle. Our situation finally starts to feel real. We’re getting close to the island of Captain Nemo … The place where my parents died.
‘Identify.’ Lee-Ann drums her fingers on the table. ‘That part is clear enough. They want to know who we are. Five hours … Is that our time to arrival?’
‘It would be two hours now,’ Gem says. ‘You guys were working on that code for three hours.’
That seems impossible. But, according to the ship’s chronometer, Gem is right. It’s one in the afternoon. I remember the coordinates I got from the super-secret map in the captain’s stateroom. I do some quick calculations based on our current course and speed.
‘It’s not our ETA,’ I decide. ‘We shouldn’t arrive at the island until seven p.m. The five-hour thing is an ultimatum. We need to figure out how to answer this challenge. And we need to do it in the next two hours.’
Virgil gulps. ‘And if we don’t respond in time, or respond the right way?’
‘Then,’ I say, ‘I imagine our own secret base will blow us out of the water.’
But no pressure.
It’s one thing to decrypt a message. It’s much harder to figure out the correct answer and say it back in the same code. And we have less than two hours to do it.
Maybe Lincoln Base – if it really is Lincoln Base – has a machine that generates messages in blue whale/five by five/Bundeli. We do not. Nor do we have access to that superweapon of information, the internet, which might help us put together the pieces.
We have to trust our own training and best guesses.
That’s terrifying.
‘Virgil,’ I say, ‘do you still have that simulator app on your phone, the one that makes whale songs?’
He stares at me in surprise. ‘I – Yeah!’
‘Will it work without an internet connection?’
‘Of course.’ He sounds mildly offended. ‘I downloaded the whole library of whale songs.’
This doesn’t surprise me. I have spent years teasing Virgil about the number of useless apps on his phone. Now I owe him a huge apology.
‘Virgil, you’re amazing,’ I say. ‘Gem, go with him to open the lockbox. Just make sure that phone stays offline.’
I doubt they could get a signal anyway, and neither Virgil nor Gem seems like the type to try sneaking a look at TikTok in the middle of the Pacific. But I feel I should remind them.
Gem nods, and off they go.
Meanwhile, Jack runs to get Nelinha. Once the two of them are back, they start puzzling out how to use the LOCUS to send messages rather than just receive.
Lee-Ann runs computations for a new encryption base. We can’t simply send back the same whale-song algorithm. That would be too easy. If it is an HP base we’re talking to, they’ll expect us to keep the format but change the register, like modulating to a new key in the middle of a song.
Halimah and I brainstorm expressions in Bundeli that we might want to send. We start with DO NOT FIRE. We figure that will be important.